New Trends in Application Development

THE FUNDAMENTALS: PLATFORMS, METHODOLOGIES AND PROFESSIONS

• From procedural to object-oriented, from proprietary to standard, from throw-away to reusable
• From the proprietary, synchronous model (COBOL/CICS/DB2 and COBOL/TDS/IDSII) to object-based application servers and asynchronous applications (MOM)
• Back office applications, the role of traditional procedural languages and developers
• The problem of achieving good object models
• Agile development methodologies: a pragmatic approach
• Open source software: a breath of fresh air
• Modelling the architecture of information systems: tools such as Mega, IDS Scheer, Telelogic, the Zachman Framework, etc.
• Modelling business processes

THE EVOLUTION OF OBJECT-ORIENTED DEVELOPMENT

• Object-oriented concepts: object, class, interface, method, properties, inheritance, encapsulation, polymorphism, overloading, aggregation and composition
• From the simple class to reusable components and frameworks
• Encouraging best practices by means of design patterns
• Struts as an outstanding example of the MVC pattern
• Characteristics of the Java language: virtual machine, intermediate compilation and interpretation
• The Java EE framework and its spheres of applicability: from the Java class to beans and to the difficult reality of EJBs
• The .NET galaxy: the model, the languages, the CLI and the CLR, what to expect from .NET 3.0 and 3.5
• The problem of object persistence and the object-relational impedance mismatch (EJB 3, JDO2, Hibernate, JPA, etc.)

JAVA AND .NET DEVELOPMENT PLATFORMS

• Introduction to the Java framework: Java EE, Java SE, Java ME, Java Card and the new interpreted JVM-based languages (Java 6)
• Fundamental Java frameworks: EJB, JMS, JDBC, JNDI, JTA/JTS and JavaMail
• Development platforms: the overwhelming popularity of Eclipse and the triumph of the plug-in model
• Development platforms: the overwhelming popularity of Eclipse and the triumph of the plug-in model, but also NetBeans
• The .NET functional model, compatible languages and the CLS (Common Language Specification) reference model
• The common language runtime (CLR): the equivalent of Java’s Virtual Machine
• The principal .NET 3.0 namespaces
• Visual Studio 2005: the preferred environment for .NET developers
• Modern development tools and techniques: CVS, profiling, build tools, refactoring, repositories
• The professionalization of development platforms: Microsoft's Team System, collaborative development platforms, IBM's Jazz

DISTRIBUTED OBJECTS AND APPLICATIONS

• The difficulties of communication among heterogeneous systems
• Basic principles of XML: document, schema, namespaces, XSLT
• The exploitation of semi-structured XML document content: the SAX and DOM models
• SOA architectures
• Orchestrating business processes and SOA architecture implementation platforms
• Organization and implementation of a distributed Web services architecture: the role of the SOAP, UDDI and WSDL standards
• The evolution of the integration platform: from integration server to bus
• The arrival of the rich client: solutions available today and the impact on development strategies
• AJAX and dynamic clients
• XML and forms: towards a generic model (XForms and InfoPath)
• New client development frameworks: Ruby on Rails, Groovy, Zend, etc.

EVENT-BASED CLIENT-ORIENTED LANGUAGES

• The reference model: event, script and interpretation. Differences with pure object models
• Fields of applications: custom throw-away applications, macros for office applications, light transactions. Examples from Visual Basic and Delphi
• Client-side internet/intranet applications: HTML, XHTML, client-side page construction with JavaScript
• AJAX and the renaissance of JavaScript, but with some disadvantages
• Three generations of server-side internet/intranet applications: CGI, event-based scripting languages such as ASP and PHP, and JSP and servlets.
• PHP 5: now as important as JSP in the battle against Microsoft, but also Python and Ruby
• Characteristics of multimedia applications: management and synchronization of clips, the use of animations, handling of raster and vector image files, the problems of standards and formats
• Concrete examples: Director and Flash (Adobe)
• The world of mobile applications: the Compact .NET and Java ME frameworks, connected and disconnected modes, best practices

APPLICATION CONTAINERS

• Definitions, the duality of development (towards freeware) and production, organization and implementation, infrastructure constraints, compatibility problems, pitfalls to avoid and technical services (security, transactions, persistence,...)
• Characteristics, advantages and disadvantages, and integration capabilities of the principal application containers available on the market: Tomcat and JBoss (Open Source), Web Logic (BEA), WebSphere (IBM), and Oracle AS
• Performance problems and the arrival of APM (Application Performance Management)

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT AND DATABASES

• The SQL query language: implementation principles, advantages and disadvantages, pitfalls to avoid and the fat request syndrome
• Java stored procedures, and the new (but dangerous) role played by the database
• Fundamental principles of commercial and open source databases: IBM DB2, Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, Informix, Sybase, MySQL and PostgreSQL  Towards a development model based on freeware.